>Sorry, you all; I know the last week on this blog has been like sitting in class and getting hand-outs from Teacher. I’ve been quite busy with BGHB stuff and proofreading the Guide. Whereupon. Whereupon I had one of those old-fashioned, Jane O’Reilly “clicks!” of recognition, although in my case it was not a housewife’s […]

>We saw one of my favorite operas on Sunday, Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, premiered in 1863 and putatively set in Ceylon. Its big tune, a duet for tenor and baritone, is apparently England’s perennial number one favorite. The Opera Boston production we saw played the Orientalism up to the hilt, with shadow puppets, projections of […]

>The blog Prometheus 6 led me to this story in the LA Times about two teachers fired for supporting students who wanted to read from Marilyn Nelson’s A Wreath for Emmett Till at an assembly honoring Black History Month: Teachers and students said the administration suggested that the Till case — in which the teenager […]

>I see that the University of Illinois is–finally–retiring its octogenarian mascot, Chief Illiniwek. If you need to be convinced of how this is related to children’s literature, take a look at some of Debbie Reese‘s work, which includes a Horn Book article from 1998 that can be found here.